Time Is a Killer

by Michel Bussi

  Campa sempre.

  She hadn’t been able to get anything more out of Orsu, but it didn’t matter; she had learned the most important thing. That her mother was alive.

  Even though she had seen her die, right in front of her own eyes, even if Orsu hadn’t explained anything. Her half-brother had merely confirmed something she had been certain of ever since she set foot back in Corsica; that secret that she had carried deep within herself, for so long.

  She was alive.

  She was waiting for her.

  In the shepherd’s cabin.

  Clotilde climbed on to a small hillock from which Arcanu Farm was visible about a hundred metres below.

  Go and stand for a few minutes beneath the holm oak, before night falls, so that I can see you.

  I will recognise you, I hope.

  Of course – her mother had hidden somewhere on the mountain so that she could see her, she was still hiding there; from any point on the mountain, in the maquis, with the broom and heather up to your waist, you could see without being seen, you could hear without being heard, you could spy without being detected. Stupidly, Clotilde had imagined that once she was in the area, in broad daylight, she would remember; she would recognise the shadows of the night, she would find the landmarks, the shape of a rock, the curve of a tree trunk, the thorns of a wild rose. Impossible. Impossible to find your bearings in this maze of chestnut trees and oaks surrounded by broom, arbutus and heather. Maquis as far as the eye could see, the scent making her head spin.

  She was about to give up, to go back down, head back to Calvi, barely five minutes with her foot to the floor, and persuade the men from Ajaccio to grant her a second interview, to make them agree to let Orsu leave the station with her, and guide her as he had the other night. Even if it was the most ludicrous of ideas. Her half-brother was in custody for murder. It would take weeks before she could obtain a letter from the examining magistrate, allowing her to stage a reconstruction.

  She was about to give up when she saw it.

  A stain, a purple stain lost among the arbutus berries.

  A drop of blood.

  And then another, a metre further off, this time on dry earth. A third, on the trunk of a cedar tree. As if Hop o’my Thumb, having run out of breadcrumbs or white pebbles, had opened his veins.

  To show her the way?

  Instinctively, she followed the bloody path. Once more, she felt stupid. It could have been left by any wounded animal, a fox, a boar, a deer. She ran her finger over the scarlet traces. The blood was still fresh.

  What other possibilities could she come up with? That a stranger, a few minutes ahead of her, had tried to reach the shepherd’s cabin? A stranger who was losing blood and wanted to get there before she did? It didn’t make any sense. As she followed the trail through the maquis, she got the impression that the heather seemed to have been parted, that some branches were broken.

  Unless it was the other way around, she thought all of a sudden. Unless this injured stranger hadn’t climbed up to the cabin, but had come down from it. It didn’t matter, the more she followed the trail of blood, the more convinced she became that it would lead her to that clearing where she had found herself three days earlier. The place where Orsu had left her, and Franck had joined her; her husband knew the way too, although she didn’t understand why or how. She hadn’t managed to contact him at all that morning, in spite of her constant calls.

  Interminable ringing.

  Voicemail.

  Please, Franck, call me back.

  Call me back.

  Call me back.

  Later, ask those questions later.

  Campa sempre.

  It was all that mattered. She had to keep going. She remembered some details now, a gentler slope, a thinning maquis, a big cork oak. She walked another few metres, and the traces of blood that guided her came closer and closer together. Suddenly the maquis opened up and the shepherd’s cabin appeared.

  Clotilde’s heart nearly exploded.

  My God!

  Her stomach lurched, she gulped, and she resisted the desire to turn around, to run away. Hop o’my Thumb was there, lying on the ground, and he hadn’t cut his wrists to guide her.

  He had been stabbed. A huge brown stain covered his right flank.

  He was dead, and probably had been for a while, lying among the faded petals of mauve and white cistus. If Clotilde hadn’t followed his bloody trail, she might have thought he was asleep.

  She walked over. She hesitated to bend down. Hesitated to speak.

  ‘Pacha?’

  There was a harpoon sticking out of the Labrador’s neck. The dog who had the same name as another one, the dog of her childhood. As if someone had wanted to deprive her of him for a second time.

  *

  The cabin door was open.

  Wasps buzzed around the corpse, already inviting themselves to the carrion picnic. Clotilde walked towards the stone building. At night, she hadn’t had time to notice the thick bolt that barred the wooden door, the metal lock of the medieval dungeon, as impregnable as the bars on the only window, flanked also by a massive and imposing oak shutter.

  The stone prison was inhabited. There was someone inside. Someone weeping.

  Was it her mother hiding in there? Walled in? Alive?

  Trembling, Clotilde went inside.

  This whole scene, everything she had been experiencing for the last five days, defied the imagination. She discovered a bed. A wooden table. Some dried flowers. A radio. Books, dozens of books, piled up on the wooden shelves, lying on the floor, reducing the size of the room almost by half.

  And in a corner, with her back to her, an old woman crouching on a stool.

  Long grey hair fell to her waist, like a wise old grandmother who’d taken the ribbon from her hair to reveal how beautiful she once was; unveiling it to her mirror, her grandchildren, a former lover.

  There was nothing of the sort in this small room.

  The old woman, almost kneeling, was confiding with a corner of the cold stone walls. Like a child who was being punished, that was the image that came to Clotilde. A child forgotten for a lifetime, who would never be rescued, but who would stay there, who would grow old there, because she was obedient and had been ordered not to move.

  ‘Maman?’

  Slowly the old woman got up.

  Her hands, her arms, her neck were stained with blood.

  ‘Maman?’

  Clotilde’s heart was almost bursting in her chest. Was it even possible? Another image appeared before her eyes, the one that had obsessed her for all these years – of her mother’s body, twenty-seven years earlier, also drenched in blood. Being crushed by a rock. And yet her mother was standing here in front of her, alive, in spite of appearances and despite all the evidence.

  At last the old woman turned round.

  Clotilde knew, she felt, that it was her.

  Maman?

  But this time the words stuck in her throat.

  The old woman looking at her with pleading eyes, begging her forgiveness, was over eighty years old, but still beautiful, dignified and proud. How she had suffered for all those years.

  But this old woman was not her mother.

  III

  Sempre giovanu

  55

  23 August 2016

  They were like twin brothers who had aged at different speeds. The first wore a polo-neck, and the second had a tattoo of a snake on his shoulder-blade. The first had the thick glasses of a short-sighted person on his nose, and the second a silver piercing in his nostril. The first wore a threadbare bottle-green corduroy suit, the second a red-and-white tracksuit, the colours of Ajaccio, a little too tight.

  Castani Brothers, second-hand and parts, it said in the advertisement.

  The one in the polo-neck had come in the truck, the one with the tattoo in the red car.

  The one in the polo-neck counted the banknotes, the one with the tattoo lifted the dented bonnet.

 
‘1,500 euros,’ he said, wiping his hands on his immaculate tracksuit, ‘but don’t expect to drive across the continent in it.’

  The customer wasn’t chatty, but he paid cash. He had asked for a discreet meeting, in the car park of the reservoir on the edge of the Bocca Serria forest. In the end, his intention hadn’t been to put the Castani brothers out: no technical checks, no registration document, just a few banknotes in exchange for an antique that was barely roadworthy.

  The one in the polo-neck slipped the banknotes into his pocket.

  ‘Be careful … That car’s been asleep in a shed for years, and I don’t want you to come a cropper.’

  The man with the tattoo closed the bonnet.

  ‘I’ve checked what I can, the steering, the wheel alignment, the brakes, they should hold out for a while. But try not to get stopped!’

  He held out the keys.

  ‘Have fun.’

  Tattoo winked at polo-neck and the two brothers got back into the truck without asking any more questions. Usually, when they sold old collectors’ items it was to do-it-yourself car mechanics, amateurs hooked on restoration. But clearly this customer wasn’t into mechanics. Tattoo put his foot down as polo-neck watched the man disappear in the rear-view mirror. In the end, the Castani brothers didn’t care what he did with that antique.

  ~

  He waited for the Castani brothers’ truck to disappear behind Cap Cavallo, then looked at the car for a moment, almost in disbelief. In just a few hours on the internet, you could unearth what even the genie of the lamp couldn’t bring you. He walked to the 4x4 parked behind the Corsican pines in the forest. He hadn’t chosen this meeting place by chance: it was isolated, and you could park off the road. He opened the door of the 4x4 and picked up the notebook from the passenger seat, then put it on the front seat of the car he had just bought.

  A matter of training.

  The hardest part was yet to come.

  He opened the boot of the all-terrain vehicle parked under the pines and parted some branches, ignoring the sting of the needles.

  ‘Shall we change cars?’

  She opened her eyes wide, stretched her arms and legs, stiff after spending hours in there. She smelled the scent of pine.

  ‘Shall we change cars?’ he had said.

  Why?

  She was bent double, almost paralysed from lying curled up in the boot. He helped her out, helped her walk a few steps. She didn’t understand, walked blindly on. Her eyes blinked in the light, struggling under the glare of the sun.

  Gradually they got used to it.

  It was then that she saw the car; right in front of her.

  A red Fuego. A GTS.

  He felt the woman’s legs giving way, and held her up. He had anticipated her surprise.

  ‘Does that bring back memories, Madame Idrissi?’

  56

  23 August 2016, 11 a.m.

  The old woman wasn’t her mother.

  She stared at Clotilde, her face covered with blood that was still flowing; unless those were red-tinted tears that were leaving tracks down her swollen bruises. She wiped them away with her long grey hair, like Mary Magdalene, the sinner.

  No, Clotilde thought, delving into her memories, the weeping woman in front of her couldn’t be her mother.

  The woman in front of her was older. A generation older.

  The woman in front of her was Lisabetta, her grandmother.

  One more mystery, one more trap, one more misfortune.

  Clotilde didn’t have time to wonder about this any longer. The shepherd’s cabin was suddenly plunged into shadow, as if a black curtain had been pulled over the door. Clotilde turned round; she wasn’t mistaken, the room had been darkened not by a curtain but by a black dress. Speranza’s dress, the witch whose shadow turned the room into a cave so that the rats, spiders and beetles could leave each crack between the stones and greet her arrival.

  Speranza spoke to Lisabetta, paying no attention to Clotilde.

  ‘They’ve taken Orsu. There’s no one left.’

  Who are ‘they’? a voice shouted inside Clotilde’s head.

  ‘She’s killed Pacha,’ Speranza went on.

  Who’s ‘she’?

  The words collided in her skull. Perhaps witches communicate by telepathy, perhaps if she thought very hard about her question the witches would reply.

  ‘The door was open when I got here,’ Lisabetta said.

  ‘Who?’ Clotilde asked softly. ‘Who are you talking about?’

  No reply.

  Perhaps the witches were deaf. Perhaps ghosts didn’t have hearing aids.

  ‘Where is my mother?’ Clotilde yelled this time. ‘Orsu told me she’s still alive! Campa sempre. Where is my mother?’

  Lisabetta slowly got to her feet. Clotilde thought she was going to give her an answer, but it was Speranza’s voice that echoed around the shepherd’s cabin.

  ‘Not here, Lisa. Not here. If you want to talk to her, talk to her down below.’

  Lisabetta hesitated, but the witch persisted.

  ‘Cassanu is coming home. The ambulance is going to drop him off at Arcanu before midday. Nothing is ready, Lisa. Nothing.’

  ~

  Nothing is ready.

  Clotilde hadn’t understood at first.

  All three of them had gone back down to the farm in silence, without exchanging as much as a word. The old women walked quickly, almost faster than Clotilde. They seemed to know every branch to grip with their wrinkled hands, every rock to step on. Their legs were accustomed to the journey, and their thin bodies had never been so light to bear.

  Nothing is ready.

  It was almost as if they were in a panic. They kept consulting their watches and as soon as they arrived, the two women seemed to forget about Clotilde. The lawyer merely followed them, feeling useless, like a guest who had arrived too early, and was now being ignored while preparations were under way. The two women went straight into the kitchen.

  Lisabetta opened the fridge.

  ‘Figatellu with lentils.’

  They were the first words that she had said in almost thirty minutes. Speranza didn’t reply, she just stooped down to the vegetable baskets and took out tomatoes and onions. Clotilde’s grandmother had already put on an apron, taken out a chopping board and placed the panzetta and figatelli on it.

  At last, as if reassured, she turned towards her granddaughter.

  ‘Sit down, Clotilde. Cassanu has spent more than twenty-four hours in Calvi hospital. He won’t have eaten anything, just think, their vacuum-packed ham, their yoghurts and purées …’ She looked at the clock. ‘Not once in seventy years, Clotilde, not once, has Cassanu sat down at the table without a meal being ready for him.’

  She smiled as she washed her hands.

  ‘Is that hard for you to understand, my darling? It’s not how things work in Paris. But it’s how it is here, and it’s not even the men’s fault, we’re the ones who bring them up like that, from when they are little.’

  ‘Where is my mother, Mamy? Where is Palma?’

  Lisabetta looked at the clock again, then picked up a huge knife.

  ‘You sit where you are, my darling, and I’ll tell you everything. Before your grandfather arrives. Corsican women know how to do that, I assure you, take care of the house and talk at the same time.’

  Perhaps Lisa could do that, but not Speranza. Head down, the housekeeper was resolutely cutting the panzetta into cubes.

  ‘It’s a long story, Clotilde. It’s your story too, even if it started long before you were born.’ She took her eyes off her knife to look over at the witch, who was neatly separating meat from fat, before going on. ‘Fifty years ago, Speranza was already working at Arcanu, although perhaps working isn’t the right word. She lived here and, as she does today, she helped me take care of everything – the household, the food, the garden, the animals. Speranza’s daughter, little Salomé, was born at Arcanu in 1948. Three years after your father. Salomé and Paul grew
up together, they were inseparable.’ She stared again at Speranza, who seemed to be concentrating on the size of the cubes of smoked meat that she was chopping. ‘Everyone here knew that they would end up getting married. That was how it was, it was written … As each year passed, the more beautiful Salomé became. Tall, dark, with hair down to her waist. Eyes like the does in the forest of Aïtone, the grace of a kid and a laugh that would have cracked Calvi citadel. A fairy story, my darling, Paul the prince, the heir to eighty hectares of maquis, and Salomé the lovely Cinderella, penniless, but we don’t care about that here, all that matters is the clan, rank isn’t so important. From the age of fifteen we’d married them off to each other. Yes, my darling, a fairy tale: once upon a time in La Revellata, Paul and Salomé would get married and have many children.’

  She stopped. Her firm fist cut the figatellu into four exactly equal parts.

  Another glance at the clock.

  11.27 a.m.

  ‘Everything came crashing down in the summer of ’68,’ Lisabetta went on softly, apparently having calculated the duration of her story with the same precision as that of her cooking. ‘And none of us suspected a thing. To tell the truth, when your father started flirting with that young Franco-Hungarian tourist camping in the field that was about to become the Euproctes campsite, we weren’t particularly worried. The Corsicans here hunt the Corsican swallow in the winter and the continental swallow in the summer. Palma would leave at the end of the season like all the other girls. Paul would shed some tears by the ferry, but then get over it a week later. What I believed was the same as everyone believed. But they wrote to each other. If you knew my darling, how much I wanted to take those letters with the Paris postmarks that the postman brought up here to Arcanu and throw them in the fire … If I had done that, my love, you wouldn’t be here listening to me, of course. It’s odd, saying all this to you, but so many tragedies and so many deaths would have been avoided. If you only knew, my poor darling, how many times I have cursed myself for not burning them.’

  She abandoned the lentils she was sorting for a moment and gently took her granddaughter’s hand. ‘Paul joined Palma in Paris for the first time at Christmas in 1969, and then again at Easter, then for Ascension, then he stayed up there and we didn’t see him all summer. He spent that summer in the Cyclades, he sent us cards from Naxos, from Sifnos and Santorini, as if he wanted to make our island jealous, perhaps he thought we weren’t jealous enough already. And it was all over, we understood that. Everyone but Salomé. Poor thing, we were all aware that she would never forget Paul. And even if she tried, her childhood sweetheart came back every summer; first with his wife, then with his wife and son, from the summer of ’71, then with his wife, your brother and you from the summer of ’74, and all the summers after that. We welcomed you in Arcanu, we kept up appearances, I even taught your mother to make figatelli, fiadone, and boar stew. Speranza went with her to pick herbs: oregano, mint and angelica. We welcomed her because she was family, even if she had stolen our son, even if we were angry with her, even if basically, just for that reason, we never loved her.’